Wednesday, September 22, 2004

I've been browsing the Net and have found some more interesting tidbits about Verizon Fios plans from CommWeb site:

Now for the clincher: Verizon will offer entertainment TV service in competition with the Incumbent CATV provider. TV will be served from the ONT over existing inside coaxial cable, where available.

The addition of TV service should help explain the otherwise odd relationship between Verizon and DirecTV.

For those of you who might have missed the announcements, Verizon has added DirecTV satellite TV service to its suite of bundled service offerings, thereby enabling Verizon to offer local, long distance, high speed Internet, wireless and, now, video service. The service was first offered in Rhode Island, will be expanded to more of New England, and is intended for all Verizon mid-Atlantic states later in the year.

Currently, this service really is nothing more than a marketing agreement that allows Verizon to represent DirecTV. Verizon expects to undercut competing packages offered by the CATV providers, who currently provide the majority of broadband Internet access services, nationwide.

Into the future, at least in my humble opinion, the relationship undoubtedly will grow to be much closer, with Verizon receiving the DirecTV video signals at a headend, multiplexing them with voice and high speed data, and delivering them over PON technology to the premises.

Well this gets more interesting by the minute. I really like DirecTV's approach and it would be great if I could just get their signal over fiber as well. I think this is really smart. In addition, Verizon has been deploying Wi-Fi in some areas that is free to access for existing users of Verizon broadband. This is just nirvana. This could be a real economic explosion here.